Apple's font hinting patents are going to expire ... freefont-freeworld to Fedora?

[Matěj Cepl]

Hi,

considering http://www.freetype.org/patents.html and 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Term_of_patent_in_the_United_States (found 
through http://lwn.net/Articles/317674/) it seems that Apple's patents 
on the bytecode interpreter are going to expire sometime in October this 
year. So, I have two questions:

1) for fedora-legal: is it so?
2) for fedora-fonts: do we care? I had some problems to display 
Inconsolata, and after emailing with its upstream author, we came to the 
conclusion that missing bytecode interpreter and non-interpretation of 
hints could be in fault here. I have installed freefont-freeworld 
package and Inconsolata seems to be better now. Do we interpret hints in 
TrueType fonts at all? If not, and we are only auto-hinting, wouldn't 
freefont-freeworld (possibly with patches on cairo, pango, and related 
KDE libraries) made Fedora fonts looking better?

Matěj

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